In the end, the business of overturning the conviction of a man who spent more than 27 years in prison for a 1997 murder was completed in less than eight minutes of the Court of Appeal’s time. This final act of R v Plummer [2025] EWCA Crim 1036 was delivered in courtroom number nine at the end of July as part of the annual deck-clearing before the close of the legal year.
This was the second time in less than five years that the court had overturned the conviction of Justin Plummer. I first spoke to Mr Plummer in the wake of his successful appeal in the summer of 2021. He rang me up from HMP Belmarsh in the happy expectation of becoming a free man.
In the first of many brief phone calls over the intervening years, he explained how he had been sleeping on the floor of his cell for years protesting his innocence before the pips that go after ten minutes, cutting off all calls to the
